Two figurines spun out of magic danced around each other, their spears at the ready. Always at the ready, but never striking out. Every time one crept close enough to make an attack someone far off in the periphery pulled the figurine back. Loki couldn’t see their faces, but he knew the figurines were growing angry with their puppeteer.
He searched for the man out there in the distance and found no one, yet he knew there was someone there.
‘Hello!’ Loki called out. ‘Where are…’
A raging wind tore his words out of his throat, but its fury was passing and as it dissipated a soft humming became audible.
‘Mum?’ Loki mumbled.
The humming cut off abruptly and an unfamiliar voice replied, ‘Ah, no. Forgive me, your highness, I didn’t mean to wake you.’
Loki scrunched up his face and forced his eyes open. Once the worst of the bleariness receded, he could just make out a woman in a trainee healer’s uniform standing over his bed. Everything past her was lost to shadow.
‘It’s still early,’ the trainee said. ‘You should try to get more sleep if you can.’
Someone had tucked him in and too thoroughly at that. The blanket was so tight, the edge of it pressed against the base of his throat. With a groan, he pulled at the fabric until it gave way and he no longer felt in danger of suffocation.
Still, he didn’t feel right — it was as if he watched the world through a veil of fog. They must have given him something. Loki’s heart leapt in relief when he learnt he would be sedated for the surgery; he had assumed the spur remnant would have to be removed the same way the healers had dealt with the spurs the day he was originally injured. Now he wasn’t so sure he ought to have been as pleased as he had been. He had a vague memory of waking up once already, but to the best of his recollection, he had drifted off again almost at once. Even keeping his eyes open was a trial at the moment.
‘Do I-I…’ Before the fog had set in, there had been a question — a very pressing question, but his throat was bone dry and his mind refused to produce a single coherent thought.
‘Hey, it’ll be all right. Your dad’s just here taking a nap, I can wake him up if you’d like,’ the trainee said.
‘No,’ Loki replied after a long pause. He tried to swallow; it physically hurt. ‘No, not him, don’t. But water? Please?’
‘Of course, your highness.’
The healer slipped into shadow; Loki was almost lost to his dreams again by the time she returned. She propped him up and held the cup of water up to his lips. The first few sips were heavenly, clearing a lingering foul aftertaste in his mouth and soothing the dryness in his throat. It was so much effort though. Loki drank about half a cup and then slumped back onto the mattress.
The trainee healer pulled his blanket back up to his shoulders. ‘Why don’t you close your eyes now and try to relax, your highness. You need to rest.’
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It was late afternoon by the time Loki stopped drifting in and out of consciousness. Rubbing at his eyes in a vain attempt to shake the lingering wooziness, he pulled himself up until he sat with his back rested against the headboard of his bed. He was in the children’s ward this time — he recognised the cutesy drawings painted onto the walls. At least none of the other beds in the room were occupied; he was in no mood for making conversation.
Life, however, wasn’t fair and he had all of a minute to himself before Eir walked into the room with a lidded cup in her hands. Eir looked about as weary as Loki felt. She set the cup down on Loki’s bedside table, then pulled up a chair over to his bed.
‘How are you doing, darling?’ she asked.
‘I’m fine. Much better, thanks.’
Eir’s lips drew tighter together. ‘We’ve removed the remaining shard of the spur and have cleaned out as much of the infection as we could, but considering the extent of the work that had to be done, I have my doubts you’re just fine less than a day later. How do you really feel? I trust you realise I don’t want any lies and half-truths from you this time around.’
‘The left leg kind of aches,’ Loki conceded. He tried to wriggle his toes and found the resulting movement sluggish. But honestly, he was just relieved he still had all his limbs. A horrid thought had crossed his mind as the healers had been about to begin – his father could have been right and his leg was beyond saving. Loki wouldn’t have known until too late. ‘It’s a different sort of ache to what it was. I don’t know, I guess just less painful than before overall.’
‘Speak up when it gets worse. We’ll give you another dose of pain reliever.’
Loki had no intention of asking for anything for the pain, but he didn’t want to argue. Instead, he asked, ‘How long am I to stay here?’
‘Until I’m convinced you’re back to full health.’
‘That sounds ominous.’
Loki immediately wished he could take back his words because Eir’s expression slipped from her usual terse look to outright anger. ‘Every lie has its price. How am I to know you are giving an honest answer when I ask you a question? You have deceived me, your father and everyone else once before. I’m not taking any chances this time, so you’ll stay here until I’m fully satisfied with your condition.’
‘I’m sorry about before,’ Loki replied in a low tone. He had a feeling no amount of apologies would placate Eir. Or his father for that matter. ‘I won’t do that again.’
‘Why did you do it in the first place?’ When Loki gave her no answer, Eir sighed and tried a more conciliatory tone. ‘I think maybe you didn’t intend things to play out as they did, is that right? Can you tell me this: how long have you been vanishing your food?’
‘A while.’
‘And why would you start doing that?’
Loki drew his arms around himself and pressed his fingers into the side of his ribcage. ‘After I got injured, the smell of food kept making me feel queasy. Asta and Caunas and father kept lecturing on about how I needed to eat more, which was really annoying. So I vanished the food and that was that, no more lectures or Asta shouting at me.’
‘You should have said you had issues with nausea. It can be a side-effect of the sedative you were given and it can also be a sign of infection. Between this, the pain and the fever, we should have caught the infection from that leftover shard of spur far, far earlier. But —’
‘I said I’m sorry, didn’t I? It was a stupid thing to do. All right, I get it,’ Loki muttered. He let his head tilt to the side until the back of his skull was pressed against the headboard. If only Eir would leave; he just wanted to get back to sleep and never think about bilgesnipes or healers again.
‘I’m sure you do. But I’m afraid that I simply don’t understand what happened. You weren’t honest about how you were feeling and you put up spells to hide how ill you were looking, actively sabotaging your recovery. Why do all this? Could you please explain this to me, Loki?’
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Perhaps on a different day, when his mind wasn’t addled with pain relievers, sedatives and whatever else they had given him since the previous evening. All he could manage now was to swallow the painful lump growing in his throat and blink away the pressure building up behind his eyes. He had only tried to be what he was supposed to be, the kind of son his father would be proud of. Now his father was furious and only more disappointed.
Loki dug his fingers deeper into the sides of his chest. ‘It doesn’t matter why.’
‘I disagree,’ Eir replied. She reached for him, but Loki leant away from her. ‘It matters to me very much.’
‘Why?’ he shot back.
That gave Eir pause and when her answer finally came, there was a hesitant undertone to it, ‘Frankly, covering up illness like this is unusual behaviour for someone your age. It’s worrying and I wonder if there was something else going on in your life.’
‘Like what?’ Loki said. But it was clear to him now that Eir wouldn’t cease her questions until she had some answer from him, so he didn’t wait for her answer. ‘I didn’t think it was all that bad, that’s why I didn’t say anything. And then I just didn’t want to be sick anymore, so I acted like I wasn’t.’
‘Is there nothing —’
‘No.’ Loki ground his teeth. ‘I’m really tired. Please, can I just go back to sleep?’
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The sun had long since set by the time both negotiating teams had stumbled out of the negotiation room. After six hours with nary a break, the majority of the participants hurried to the very belated dinner waiting for them. Odin strode in the opposite direction; his day was not yet done.
A trainee healer greeted him politely at the entrance to the Medical Wing and was quick to run and fetch Eir.
‘Loki’s doing better,’ Eir said before he even voiced the question that had been nagging at him throughout the day. She stripped off a pair of silk gloves and shoved them into the pocket of her coat. ‘He drifted off to sleep about twenty minutes ago. It’s probably best not to disturb him; he needs all the rest he can get. Would you like some tea? You rather look like the elves are getting the best of you.’
‘No, we’re getting the best of the elves, I assure you,’ Odin replied. The accuracy of this claim was debatable. The Asgardian negotiating party had made two major concessions over the course of the day, but he hoped that these short-term defeats would work in Asgard’s favour in the long term. ‘But when my Chief Healer suggests I have tea, I dare not refuse.’
Eir chuckled and led him towards her office. It was a cramped space with a desk in the middle and a long bench, which was crowded with beakers and bottles labelled in Eir’s spidery scrawl, stretched out across the back of the room. Along the side walls Eir had screens projecting images of every key room in the Medical Wing, giving her a constant overview of everything happening within her domain.
Odin tried to find Loki in those screens. The room where Eir had placed him was darkened; Odin could just make out a lumpy shape atop one of the beds. There was no sign of movement. As Odin sunk into a creaky, but comfortable seat opposite Eir’s desk, he asked, ‘How is he really? Is he eating?’
‘His fever is lower and he says he’s in less pain than he was yesterday. As to eating, not so much, only a nutrition replacement potion. He’s scarcely been awake for more than an hour at a time today and it sounds like he hasn’t been eating properly ever since he was originally injured. It will take a few days to work up to full-size meals.’
‘What do you mean “sounds like”?’
‘He had persistent nausea ever since he was injured and decided to vanish his food rather than deal with the cause of the nausea. It’s about as much as I’ve managed to pry out of him.’
‘Wonderful.’ Odin rubbed circles into his right temple. ‘Has he been uncooperative?’
‘Not as such.’ Somewhere from among the forest of bottles and beakers on the bench, Eir excavated a small kettle and a box of loose leaf tea. She filled the kettle and set it atop a slightly raised platform on the far left-hand side of the bench. The heating mechanism built into the bench worked quickly; within moments water started to bubble inside the kettle. ‘He hasn’t been intransigent with me or my staff, but he’s reluctant to answer our questions. Honestly, he doesn’t want to be in the Medical Wing a second longer than he has to.’
‘Do you think that’s why? Not to be impolite, but it’s not uncommon for children to be frightened to go to a healer. Loki’s never displayed signs of that before, but just think of his last experience here — you had to dig out foreign material out of his shattered legs without any pain relief. It would be understandable if he didn’t want to return.’
Steam began to stream out of the kettle’s nozzle. Eir set out two deep mugs and poured in the water. She didn’t offer Odin anything with the tea nor did she add anything to her own mug, which left him wondering if she didn’t have honey or milk on hand, or if she remembered he drank his tea black. He rarely drank tea, but Frigga had long been in a habit of consuming copious amounts when she had worrisome matters on her mind. Inevitably, when one of the boys was sick and Frogga’s mug never got the chance to grow cold, Odin too ended up with a mug of tea in his hand.
Eir took up a chair next to Odin rather than her proper one behind her desk. ‘Possibly. Yet that doesn’t mesh particularly well with the way he carried himself around any of the healers here. But I have no other theories to offer you. All I got out of him was he was tired of being sick, which doesn’t seem like the full story.’
‘I don’t want to say that Loki’s difficult.’ Odin sighed and sipped at his tea. ‘Both boys make enough trouble to make sure I won’t have a single hair left on my head by the time they are grown. Yet I understand at least what Thor was thinking when he ventures on whatever the latest manifestation of his youthful foolishness might be. Loki, on the other hand. Trying to retrace the path of Loki’s thoughts is rather like chasing a weasel through twelve miles of forest thicket.’
‘He’s a smart boy, sometimes too smart for his own good.’
‘Do you think I should try to speak to him?’ Odin asked and at once shook his head. ‘No, he won’t tell me anything more than he told you. We’ll wait until Frigga returns; she does better with him than I do.’
‘Almost all children are closer to one parent than the other, there’s nothing to be ashamed about in that,’ Eir replied. She gave him an appraising look before she went on. ‘However, if you are in the mood for self-flagellation, remember this: you told me to release the boy prematurely and I acquiesced. You can interrogate Loki as long as you like about why he didn’t say anything, but the responsibility ultimately lies solely with the two of us.’
‘What of the healer you assigned to him? He must have been profoundly incompetent not to notice Loki’s lies.’
Odin had already had Asta informed that she would not be supervising Loki or Thor ever again and her future employment in the palace as a whole was under review. He would have fired her outright, but he was loath to do so until he had Frigga’s approval. Asta technically was in the queen’s, not the king’s, employ. The dim-witter healer Loki had played day after day had to be dealt with too.
‘I had to choose someone who wouldn’t be interested enough to pick at the matter were they to notice something off about Loki. You directed me to do as much: keep the truth from getting out even if you have to compromise on the child’s health.’
‘That was never my intention.’
‘But that was the implication, your majesty.’ Eir gulped at her tea. ‘You need to tell him, for both your sakes. A relationship founded on a lie seldom prospers.’
It took every ounce of self-control Odin possessed not to leap out of his seat and utter exactly what he thought of Eir. From the day she had found out Loki’s heritage, she had been incessant in muttering in Frigga’s ear that Loki should be told. Had Eir had her way, Loki would have known he was a frost giant before he knew how to walk. In her opinion, it was healthier for a person to know who they are from the beginning. Odin had lost track many, many years ago of the number of disagreements he had had with his wife because of Eir’s meddling.
‘How do you imagine it would have worked?’ Odin said. He had tried to keep his tone calm, but his irritation seeped through. ‘Young children cannot keep a secret. Within days it would have been on the mouths of everyone in the palace, then the whole of Asgard and before the month’s end throughout the other realms.
‘The politics of Loki’s very existence are fraught. So far, Laufey has had the wits not to challenge Asgard again, but there are restless factions on Vanaheim who are looking for an alliance with Jotunheim. If Laufey were to find out that Loki lives, he would demand him back. It doesn’t matter that he abandoned Loki to the elements; he won’t accept his off-spring in my possession. And when I don’t hand Loki over, Laufey will find enough rage in that cold husk of his to make that alliance with the Vanaheim rebels. And we will have war across two realms.’
Eir offered Odin a mirthless half-smile. ‘It’s a dark vision of the future you paint, but I don’t think it’ll come to pass. Loki’s growing up. He is old enough now to keep vital facts to himself.’
‘I’ll tell him one day; I always planned to do so. But not yet.’
‘This has nothing to do with politics,’ Eir replied. ‘You’re worried about his reaction.’
‘He won’t take it well.’ Odin brought the tea up to his lips and set the mug back down again, suddenly there was nothing in the universe he wanted less than tea.
‘No, he won’t.’ Eir sighed. ‘I think you’re right to be concerned, but I wouldn’t assume it’ll be easier when he’s older. There’s no such thing as the perfect time to shatter your child’s very world.’
Odin pushed his mug away. ‘It’s not as dire as that. Thank you for the tea and your advice nevertheless. I should retire and prepare for tomorrow. I’ll try to visit Loki again in the morning.’
Bloody meddling woman.